Restricted Boolean on LinkedIn

booleanstringsBoolean, LinkedIn

Since a recent update of the LinkedIn search for personal accounts (including the paid business accounts), we are now seeing the above screen for the searches that used to work fine.

Here is what happened. As a push to make people sign up for more expensive accounts, LinkedIn has now restricted the number of Boolean operators we can use in a search. The help article Boolean Query Limitations says this:

LinkedIn now limits the amount of AND or OR Boolean operators in a search.

The limitation has little to do with “scraping” – and makes searching using any personal account quite challenging. What LinkedIn wants is for people to sign up for Sales Navigator, Recruiter Lite, or LinkedIn Recruiter. Only those, higher-paid accounts will allow searching with many Boolean operators (as it’s often necessary).

If you are searching with a personal account:

  • NOTs are not restricted – use as many as you like
  • ANDs are restricted. But there is a workaround: just do not use the operator AND explicitly; we can still search with many terms combined
  • ORs are restricted – and that is very unfortunate! There is no set number of ORs that make queries fail but using more than 3-4 would result in the above screen. (Needless to say, the message on the screen “This one’s is our fault… Retry search” is quite misleading).

Of course, we can still use X-Raying on Google, or a Custom Search Engine like http://bit.ly/LinkedIn-XRay, or Social List.

Edited: I have found a workaround! Email me for details.